Glory Season by David Brin

Rating: WARTY!

This is a seven-hundred sixty-some page tome of a tombstone of a novel, and the reason for that is not that there's a huge story to tell, but that the author is so obsessed with world-building that he forgets to actually tell a story.

It's supposed to be about two sisters: clone-twins in a world where winter twins are nowhere near as appreciated as summer twins - why is never really explained. Rather than stay with their clan as summer clones do, they must leave to seek their fortune. It takes almost a hundred pages - a seventh of the story - before they actually leave the city! Most of those pages are taken up with world building - in a world they're due to leave, so why expend all that time on it?

If it had been done beautifully, that would be one thing. I'd still consider it a senseless waste of time, but it would have been readable. The problem is that it's not done beautifully. The author seems like he's obsessed with tossing in every flitting idea that crosses his transom and creating endless races of people, each of which is given a cursory mention and we move on. It was pointless because none of it stood out, and nothing was memorable or even interesting, nor did it contribute a single thing to the story unless endlessly-waffling confusion was actually the author's intent.

I quickly tired of this and gave up after a hundred pages or so. I have better things to do with my time than read another author's listing of all the alien species he thought up, but had never found a novel to fit them into so he decided to use this one as his waste disposal unit. This is the third Brin I've tried to read. The first, Kiln People, I read a long time ago and really enjoyed, but the last one, and now this I have not, so I guess I'm done with this author now. I can't commend this based on what I read of it.

The Dragon Choker by Stephanie Alexander

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata:
"...the more likely her husband would give up and returned to his own chamber." Returned need the -ed suffix removed.
"He must think thusly at times" - 'thusly' isn't really a word. The 'ly' needs to be omitted.
"...and since they both knew the way they let themselves in." - this needed a comma after 'way'.
"She lit on the muddy ground..." - unless she shone a flashlight on it or set fire to it, lit is the wrong word. It needed to be alit or alighted. Either is acceptable.

This is volume two of a series based on the Cinderella fairy-tale. There are several quite varying "Cinderella" stories though history, originating from as far and wide as Greece and China, but most people tend to think of Cinderella as the version written by Charles Perrault in 1697, titled Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre ("Cinderella or the little glass slipper"), which is where the Disney Fairytale Mining Corporation™ lifted the premise for the animated version it put out in 1950. That's the version that introduced the two evil stepsisters, the glass slipper, the pumpkin and all that, and upon which this novel is loosely-based.

I haven't read volume one of this series, and I'm far from convinced I'd like it if I did, so I wasn't about to try reading that before I started on this one. Since I'm not very much into series, whether I'd end up liking this one was the question. I started out quite happy that it wasn't written in first-person voice - which I despise, and which would have decidedly turned me off it, so I commend the author for that wise choice.

It was decently-written for the most part (subject to occasional grammatical and word-choice errors, some examples of which I'll list below. It did keep me engaged for a while, but as time passed I started losing faith in the author and consequently my interest in the story waned considerably. I also had problems with some of the plot choices and with the portrayal of Eleanor, which I think belied the book description - or more accurately the book description misrepresented the novel.

It was from that description though, that I had become intrigued by this story, being led to believe that the novel was something bit different from the usual premise. The not-so-happily-ever-after induced me to request it for review. The description began, "Eleanor Brice Desmarais, she of the cracked glass slipper and unladylike intellectual propensities" and that caught my attention. 'Desmarais' is French for 'of the swamp' so maybe there's some history related to that in volume one. Or maybe not! I can't speak to that. Character names are important to me so I tend to have them mean something which may not always be apparent to the reader, but maybe I read more into other authors' choices than I ought.

This promise of 'unladylike intellectual propensities' however, failed to materialize unless all that the person writing that description meant was that Eleanor had a sexual appetite. Oh how scandalous - a woman enjoys sex! Who knew?! Seriously? But if that's the case, then the writer of the description needs to get an education regarding the difference between intellectual and sexual.

The really sad thing about Eleanor though, and the tragic paradox of this story is that she's purported to be the people's princess, and yet she was risking bringing down shame on herself and the royal family by her uncontrolled behavior. This is hardly how a great princess behaves. She seems to have been modeled on Princess Diana, but unlike in that real life case, Eleanor starts her affair long before she's ever built-up any credibility by demonstrating a generosity of spirit, a warmth, and a caring attitude that the real life Diana did before she embarked on her affair. There's a huge difference between the two.

I think intellectual is sexy, but if it was merely used as a euphemism for sexual propensities, then it was a cheap shot. If it actually meant intellectual, then it missed the mark because Eleanor did not come across as any such thing. Quite the opposite. She spent all her time pining for Dorian, the best friend of her husband, Prince Gregory. At one point Eleanor mentions Dorian's "girth" and from that I could conclude only that her 'intellect' seemed decidedly low and her interest in him had nothing to do with love since they never seemed to have any conversation that didn't revolve around their physical trysting.

The story was boring because this was all she ever did. There was one brief interlude where she was visiting the poor and talking about opening school for girls, but that was a bump in an otherwise featureless romp, or unending talk of romping, or unending wishful thinking of romping, with Dorian. She didn't even spend any significant time with her child - not according to how this was written up to the point where I quit reading it, about a quarter the way through. Maybe things changed later, but I had zero faith, given what I'd read thus far, that it would improve. Eleanor was a one-trick pony (interpret 'trick' however you like), and she wasn't remotely interesting to read about.

I can understand that a woman who is unhappy in her marriage may seek solace elsewhere. I don't have a problem with that, and missing the first volume may well skew my perception, but did Eleanor even try to resolve things with Gregory or did she just leap right onto Dorian's girth? I know Gregory could be a bit of a jerk at times, but overall he did not seem to be a bad person, yet Eleanor was willing to spend all kinds of time on sexual technique with Dorian. Could she not spend any time at all working on her marriage with Gregory?

This perception diminished her in my eyes, and led me to the conviction that she's not much deserving of sympathy or support. Like I said, without having the first volume under my belt, maybe I'm misjudging her, but frankly she seems like a bit of a sleaze here. It's not a good look on her! If once in a while she'd expressed some regret or harked back to earlier times when she'd tried to work with her husband to make their marriage a good one and been rejected by him, that would have changed my perception of her, but in this story she's all Dorian all the time and it's tedious.

This book seriously failed to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test (after a fashion) because all Eleanor could think of was how to get with her lover. She had a one-track mind. Talking of Disney, it's like she had no life that wasn't animated by Dorian. After I'd read that book description, what I'd been hoping for was someone like the princess in my own novel, Femarine which really did have a different mindset from your usual princess story.

The very reason I wrote that was to offer readers some sort of an antidote to the disturbing plethora of stories about simpering, compliant princesses and their wilting addiction to princes charming, and it seemed I was not wrong because there is a readership for the road less taken. I just wish publishers and other authors would embrace that more, but it seems all they want to do it retread this old story, and even when a slightly different direction is taken - like this one attempted, the original prince is merely replaced by a new 'prince' and off we go, stuck on the same old rutted road - or rutting road in this case!

This is why I tend not to believe book descriptions much, because I've seen so many misleading ones, and it bothers me that they often seem to have been written by people who haven't read the novel, or in the case of YA stories, by people who seem to have completely missed the point of the #MeToo movement. But moving on: Eleanor is the Cinders of this story, having the slipper and the requisite two stepsisters, although as in the Drew Barrymore Ever After movie which I enjoyed, one of the sisters is friendly toward Eleanor. The other, Sylvia, is very much antagonistic and deceitful. Fortunately, she does not know that Eleanor has the hots for her husband's best friend Dorian, for that would be a disaster she'd dearly love to exploit.

I have to say a word about poor Sylvia. I was not a fan of hers, but she's after Prince Gregory. In her pursuit, she's doing nothing worse than Eleanor is doing, and arguably better since, unlike Eleanor, Sylvia isn't married! The problem is that she's portrayed as some sort of marriage wrecker or trouble-maker! When Dorian sees what she's up to he makes a mental note to tell Eleanor. The thing is that Gregory is known for quite literally whoring around, and Eleanor is already getting down to it with Dorian, so why slut-shame Sylvia? It was inappropriate at best, and it wasn't the only case where a woman is demeaned in this book.

On another occasion I read, "Pandra was twelve years his senior, but she was amazingly well preserved for all her years of use." What? That means she was only 38, not old by any means. Saying she was amazingly well preserved is ageism without a doubt. It's one thing to have a character say something like that about another person; it's an entirely different thing to have the author say it - and that comment wasn't in a character's speech - it was in the narrative! Now you can argue that it was intended as the thought of either Prince Gregory or Dorian, but that wasn't indicated as such, and if it was indeed Dorian's thinking, what does that say about his attitude toward women?

At a ball, Eleanor is recommending Dorian ask this one girl who'd shown an interest in him, to dance with him. This was not because she wanted Dorian to, but because it would be a diversion from their mutual horniness. After that I read, again not as speech, but as narration, "In truth, Patience had been an obvious dingbat." It's like if you're not part of the small specific set of people of whom Eleanor approves, then all you merit is insult. It really turned me off her. This was not the 'intellectual propensity' girl I'd been promised - someone deep and interesting, strong and motivated, fun to read about. She was just the opposite and I didn't like her.

And 'dingbat'? The term has been around for a century, but it's hardly terminology from the Cinderella era! I know you can't write a novel in ancient English - it would be tedious to read, if not impossible! - but you can write it with a bit of an atmosphere, ans a nod and a wink to the period in which it's supposedly set. This one was written with such a modern outlook that for me, it kept tripping up the narrative, making it seem like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be ancient or modern.

In this world, it is, of course, a capital offense for the princess bride to have an affair, even with the prince's best friend, so one has to wonder about Dorian's love for Eleanor when he willingly puts her life at risk by continuing to see her for sex. She's obviously so weak-willed that she can't help herself, but you'd think he'd be strong for her, if he cared. On the other hand, he's reported as someone who's been lucky to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases since he cannot for the life of him keep his junk in his pantaloons. He's had sex with so many women, he's lost count, so maybe his integrity is as poor as hers and his backbone just as flimsy. At any rate Eleanor has no reason to believe she's not just another conquest. Not from what I read anyway.

I began reading this with interest and quickly encountered an unintentionally amusing scene which brought the novel some credit by putting me in a good mood. That was sadly dissipated with disturbing velocity by further reading, and in truth it was another writing issue. An exasperated Eleanor is mucking-out the stable where her unicorn is housed. She's not doing this because she has to, but because she needs something to take her mind off her frustrations. While she's thus engaged, her husband and Dorian come down to take out the prince's horse, Vigor, for a ride.

In what I consider to be an amusingly unfortunate juxtaposition of ideas, I read, "Gregory kissed her again. This time she felt the flick of his tongue. He mounted and she held Vigor's bridle." Now, who or what exactly is he mounting - his horse or his bride? LOL! I assume it's his horse, but it just goes to show that one needs to be careful when writing narrative! There really needed to be something between "his tongue" and "He mounted" to distance the two actions. On a more adolescent note, it also struck me that the very title of this novel is rather unfortunate. To be clear: the Dragon Choker isn't a teenage boy's slang term for masturbation. It refers to a beautiful necklace that Prince Gregory buys for Eleanor and for which she shows little gratitude. Again, unlike the necklace, she came off in a bad light.

So, in short, I did not finish this novel. I gave up on it because the more I read the more I disliked Eleanor and the more I disliked the story. It felt like there were problems with the plot that could have been avoided with more sensitive writing, and with a better portrayal of Eleanor (and maybe a somewhat worse portrayal of Gregory). Eleanor comes across not only as having no character, she doesn't even have any depth - and certainly no intellect, let alone any sort of propensity at all to growing one. She wasn't interesting and I did not want to read any more about her. I wish the author all the best in her writing career, but I can't commend this one as a worthy read.

Titan by François Vigneault

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a graphic novel in limited colors by a Canadian artist and writer. While the art isn't completely to my taste, I didn't think it was awful, but I didn't get the warm colors. Titan is almost a billion miles from the sun, and it ain't warm out there. I felt the color palette ought to have been blues, not the warm colors used here, but that's just me. Once I got used to it, I didn't really pay it any attention. I focused on the story, which after all is the most important part, otherwise it's just a picture book. While that can sometimes work, I prefer a good written story to an implied one. I have to say up front that this is a very graphic novel with sex scenes, so be warned!

The story begins with "MNGR" (everyone who has a title has it capitalized and with no vowels in it in this story!) João da Silva landing on Titan to get the mining operations back up to speed since they're been falling off lately. The atmosphere - among the living inhabitants that is - is stressed and full of fomenting revolution. The moon, the largest one orbiting Saturn and the second-largest satellite in the Solar System is populated by genetically-amped-up WRKRs who are significantly larger and tougher than humans. They mine hydrocarbons, although exactly why is rather glossed over as is why they have genetically adjusted miners as opposed to robots.

The atmosphere of Titan itself wasn't well-represented. It was shown as rocky whereas it's really an ice moon - and the ice isn't water, but methane. In short, it's really nasty out there. Everyone is wearing a space suit and helmet so it's not until they get indoors that João finally gets a look at Phoebe Mackintosh, who will be his liaison during his work to reorganize and ramp up the efficiency of the Titan operation.

Rebecca is kind of sexy despite dwarfing João in size, and she speaks a sort of patois which is fortunately quite intelligible (I don't know if this originated in English or French, Vigneault being Québécois). Anyway, they bond together and survive a revolution, but they don't remain together at the end which I found rather sad, especially since they discussed it during their encounters, one of which is quite graphic and very sexual. I loved their coy talk afterwards!

I applaud the author for telling an interesting story and for showing a rather asymmetrical relationship without any fuss or judgment. It was entertaining and a fun read. I was sorry the translation went the road most traveled and referred to Earth dwellers as 'Terran'. I have no idea where that began, but it's always struck me as stupid. No one has ever referred to humans as 'Terrans' except in sci-fi and to me it sounds ridiculous - like we're all a bunch of tortoises or something. But that's just a pet peeve of mine. I don't know if the original did this or if this was just the translated version.

Overall I found this to be entertaining and engrossing, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Ill Wind by Roxanne Longstreet Conrad aka Rachel Caine aka Julie Fortune

Rating: WARTY!

This urban fantasy novel title shares my initials, and I have to live up to its title here, because, while the first time I read it, it wasn't great, neither was it awful, so I got the next two volumes thinking I might get into it. In some ways the story has a good premise, but in others, it's trope and cliché and I've moved on from that because of so many substandard and/or otherwise disappointing reads I've been through. I much prefer the road less-traveled these days because I've become so tired of reading the same old stories under supposedly different, but instead just are highly flimsy guises, and this novel is far from a road less traveled. So in the end it really was an Ill Wind for me.

It harks back to the ancient idea that there are four elements: air, earth, fire, and water, which is patent nonsense, but under this premise, the protagonist is a powerful weather warden (the series title). Weather wardens control the weather which means all of us ought to be really pissed-off with them, because they sure aren't doing much of a job. By that light, we ought to be extra pissed-off with Joanne Baldwin since she controls two of the four elements, and that, apparently, is rare.

Joanne is on the run from someone or something, and desperately trying to find her heroic guy to rescue her, and that 'damsel in distress' motif is a problem for me, especially since we don't learn very quickly exactly what she's supposed to have done, although the blurb talks of "accusations of corruption and murder." I have no clue exactly what it was she's supposed to have done because the story was not that memorable, and it's irrelevant anyway because you know for a fact it will turn out that she was set up.

But I gave up on the second reading far too early to get that information refreshed because I really didn't care to read it again. I don't even recall why it needed to be such a mystery except as a rather ham-fisted attempt to lure the reader on. It didn't lure me on as I recall. I was more interested in Joanne and her powers, but that interest was somewhat diluted by her desperate need of a St George.

So all I can say is that this didn't really do it the first time, and although I resolved - for whatever reason - to give it a chance, on closer examination, it failed. But what I lose on the read-about, the local library gains for its book carousel, so I can't complain too much! But I can't commend this either.

Fire in Frost by Alicia Rades

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this ebook right around the fifty percent mark. It had started out pretty decently and in spite the first person voice which I typically detest, I was getting along with it and growing interested in the main character, but the more she felt her psychic powers coming in, the more stupid she got it seemed, and if there's one thing I can't stand to read, it's a YA novel where the female author seems absolutely determined to make her main female character as dumb as a brick. I quit right after an incident I shall describe below. I can't commend this based on the half of it that I read.

The basis of the story is that young Crystal has a psychic mom, who of course in the tradition of YA novels like this, has never told her daughter a thing about her powers and her daughter wasn't smart enough to notice. Of course her daughter is the most powerful psychic in several generations, and when her period starts, she starts, first by seeing the ghost of a dead classmate, who died in a house fire the year before, and things escalate from there to the point where the daughter magically seems to be able to do anything.

I'm not a fan of the road most traveled, so I started losing faith in this author when this business of her powers arriving at puberty was introduced. I was even willing to let that slide if the story was good, but it got worse. She 'connected' with a crystal ball (her name's Crystal, get it?!) at her mother's new age shop. The ball wasn't even crystal, it was glass, and I began to wonder why the author hadn't simply named her character Crystal Ball. When she tried to use this glass orb, she had to light candles first. So there was nothing new or different here, the author taking the path of least resistance, otherwise known as Lazy Avenue South.

In the ball, Crystal saw a dark figure kidnap a young girl from her bed. Of course, it being the way of things having to be so vague as to be useless in these stories, there was zero information about who this was or when it had happened. Instead of being fascinated with her powers working so well, and trying to learn all she could about what was going on, Crystal freaked out and threw the ball on the floor, and it didn't break!

The very next morning, she's toasting a bagel and turns on the TV supposedly for the weather (apparently Crystal doesn't have a cell phone - maybe she uses a crystal radio...), she catches an item on the news about a young girl being abducted from her home and is too stupid to put two and two together. She just blindly turns off the TV and leaves for school.

Crystal has a best friend named Emma and despite this purported BF status, they neither of them seem to tell the other a damned thing, which serves only to betray the author's claim of their supposed closeness. I was willing to let that go until it got really bad. Here's one incident, as an exemplar of how bad it was. Crystal is in the restroom with Emma, who doesn't know she's psychic since her powers have only just come in.

Crystal is obsessed with people accusing her of being a witch if this gets out and her being shunned at school which is why she's told no-one. Why in this day and age would anyone accuse a psychic of being a witch? Far too many idiots actually believe in psychics - they pay good money to have their fortune told and so on. Why would there be a witch hunt? None of this made any sense to me, especially in light of the fact that the very reason her mother had settled there to begin with was the prevalence of people who live there and who have psychic abilities.

Anyway, Crystal finally decides to come clean with Emma, so they go into the bathroom and check the stalls, which are empty, and Crystal reveals her secret. Then Emma leaves and Crystal uses the stall. Finally she comes out and starts washing her hands, and another stall opens and this other girl is there who has apparently been there all the time and heard everything!

Excuse me? Didn't the author just say they checked the stalls to insure privacy? So how did they miss her? Does she have the power to make herself invisible? Frankly, I think the author just lost track of what she'd written, or simply didn't think it through properly.

I mean if all they'd done was to glance idly under the doors and left it at that, and the character who eavesdropped had been established as someone who sneaks into bathrooms to spy on people, then yes, maybe, but the author established none of that. She didn't say they looked under doors, she wrote that they checked each stall! This was really bad writing. The author isn't a bad writer per se, but some of her plotting was awful, and to use the old 'I heard it through the bathroom vine' trope is sadly unoriginal and lacking in imagination.

This other girl hiding in the stall threatens Crystal that if she doesn't help her, she'll tell everyone about her psychic powers, and expose her, and Crystal immediately caves-in, fearing being branded a witch! LOL! In reality she could just have claimed that everything this girl is saying is bullshit and got Emma to back her up. It turns out his other girl thinks her best friend Kelli is being abused by her boyfriend Nate, and she wants Crystal's help to prove it. If that's the case, then why not just say that to Crystal right from the start and ask her for help instead of threatening her? Again it made no sense! There was no feeling of female camaraderie here at all.

Crystal seems really reticent about telling Emma anything, and vice versa. This made no sense given they're supposedly best friends, but Crystal outright lies to Emma about why she has to sneak off after school. She has to sneak off to meet this girl who apparently couldn't tell her a thing about what she wanted in an empty bathroom, and insisted they meet later! This made zero sense either. Even when Crystal knows this is a good and useful thing to help with, she still lies to Emma about it. Why? It made zero sense.

Having seen Crystal talking to his girlfriend, this guy Nate threatens Crystal, pinning her against the locker and holding her by her throat, and all Crystal does is cower down wondering how she will ever get proof that he's abusing his girlfriend, instead of thinking, "He just abused me! I'm going to report him to the principal!" And why would Nate even care about one single short exchange he'd witnessed from a distance, between Crystal and his girlfriend? Not one thing in this whole series of events made any sense at all. It was really poorly plotted.

So characters who'd started out quite engagingly, were suddenly stupid and cardboard-thin and it really made the story go downhill. It's not that the whole novel is badly-written; some of it is quite well put-together, but it just didn't feel realistic any more when all this stuff began to go down. It felt like poor-quality fanfic. It was poorly designed, and completely unacceptable as a viable story. I can't commend it.

La Dame aux Camélias aka Camille by Alexandre Dumas fils

Rating: WARTY!

Purportedly based on the real life of Alphonsine Rose Plessis, a French courtesan and popular mistress who died at the age of 23 from tuberculosis, and whose belongings were auctioned-off to pay her debts. Alexandre Dumas fils had an affair with her for about a year, and wrote this semi-fictional account it after her death. His novel became the basis of Verdi's La Traviata

That's how this story begins, with the unnamed narrator learning of such an auction, at which he buys a sort of diary. Madame Gautier (this is how the woman is referred to in the novel) never was Camille. She was Marguerite, and the title of the book in French was La Dame aux Camélias from which 'Camille' was derived, but this novel isn't really about "Camille" - it's about this guy Armand Duval's take on her. Duval is obviously Dumb-Ass himself, and that's how the story goes - or fails to. It's so meandering that it makes the Delta of Venus!) look like Love Canal.

I couldn't stand to real more than a few chapters. It was boring. I kept hoping it would get better, but it never does. It felt like a very selfish novel to me, and far from anything that could be seen as honoring a woman he supposedly had feelings for. I can't commend it base don what I read.

Sub-Human by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a classic example of why I don't like series. The first book can only ever be a prologue and I don't do prologues, but sometimes a book description makes it sound interesting enough that I bite and taste the sour when I was expecting sweet. I have to confess to my own part in this inexcusable crime because even the description had warnings in it that I chose not to heed.

The story is about Craig Emilson who is "a young doctor" why his age is important to the blurb-writer I have no idea, but it goes on to say that he's "sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III" when in fact he volunteers. He enlisting to become a "Special Forces suborbital paratrooper", but why a doctor would do that is completely glossed over.

He's "selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history-a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong Artificial Intelligence." Why him again is glossed over. Why not drop a bomb on it? Why send a doctor when one isn't needed? Why make your main character a doctor instead of a computer scientist? The feeling I got, the further I read into this, was that it was very much fan fiction, and not well thought through - the author going for melodrama instead of realism. That's never a good thing in my book.

My first inkling that this was not for me was right at the beginning where the doctor is being injected with some sort of nano-bobs. Those are like thingumabobs, but they infest sci-fi stories. These are supposed to help maintain his respiratory system when there's no oxygen. Why this was necessary goes unexplained so obviously it was to get the main character and this nubile doctor together. Telegraph much? That wasn't the problem though. The problem was the inappropriate behavior of the young (naturally), attractive (of course) female doctor who hits on him. I'm like "What?!" Here's the exchange:

"You're married, huh?" the doctor asked, apparently rhetorically. Craig nodded anyway. "That's a shame. You're way too handsome to be married. Handsome young doctors like you should be single. Then single doctors like me could marry you instead."

From that point it was obvious that those two would end-up together, so his present wife needed to be dealt with, and that conveniently happens when she thinks he's dead after the mission (or at least brain-dead, which she got right), and so she happily married a sixty-year-old guy (ie twice her age) with whom she's been working and of whom she denies having any sort of relationship when her husband got jealous in an earlier chapter!

That phone call was a joke. At one point she warbles sickeningly, "I never miss a call when we schedule it, baby, and I never will," and then very shortly afterwards says, "Don't 'baby' me, Craig! I'm not a child!" Excuse me? Isn't that precisely the same thing that you just did to him? Like I said, the writing is amateurish and thoughtless.

Another example came in that same section. He says, "I'm not brilliant like you." And she responds, "Not brilliant? Craig, you're a doctor!" I'm sorry but that doesn't necessarily follow. There are doctors who are brilliant, but there are also doctors who are idiots. On top of that he uses stock phrases like "In this brave new world of ours..." which about made me barf, and there's a robot which is named Robbie. And not after Margot, I'm sure.

In short, this was pathetic and a waste of my time. I couldn't stand to read more than about five chapters, let alone a whole series, because it was so sickening to read. I can't commend it. It was pathetic.

The Taker by Alma Katsu

Rating: WARTY!

This had sounded good from the description, but it sounded less good when I realized it was merely a prologue to a trilogy, and worse, it was written in mixed voice, with short, third-person interludes that segued into lengthy first-person flashbacks. This is not my kind of a novel. It's a tired, unimaginative, and clunky format. In short it's exactly what I'd expect from an author who boasts a BA in literature and writing, and an MA in Fiction, and especially from someone who apparently studied with novelist John Irving. I read about fifty pages of it, and it was so lethargic that I gave up on it out of tedium.

The story made no intelligent sense from what little bit I did read. I don't get how someone with supposed academic qualifications needs three novels to drag out a single-novel story. But I understand that kind of rip-off does pay well for both publishers and author, and let's face it: it's pretty much all she wrote.

This doctor, in a small New England town, goes to work on the night shift and is delivered a police detainee who is suspected in a murder - to which she confessed when found by a police officer. She wore a blood-soaked shirt, and was walking without a coat on a freezing night. The police brought her to the hospital for evaluation, and the doctor could find nothing wrong with her physically, but she started telling him a story of herself and her partner - a man she killed at his own request. They were she claimed, extraordinarily long-lived people. She kept urging the doctor to let her escape, but if she'd really wanted that, why not do it when she was free instead of wandering down a highway to be picked up by the police?!

Like I said, it made no sense, the first person voice was ridiculous - as it typically is. There's no way she had that kind of photo-perfect and audio-perfect recollection after all those years, so it lost all credibility for me. The idiot doctor was buying into everything she said without a shred of professional interest in her mental condition, or any sliver of disbelief, so he wasn't remotely believable as a medical practitioner. A case like this screamed for psychiatric evaluation, but nowhere was that discussed.

Even granted all that, her story needed to be nowhere near as detailed as it was. It felt like an amateur attempt at telling a story where no thought had been put into how it would all sound. The author seemed overly-enamored of the framing technique as befit her academic mind-washing: distressed beauty tells story to handsome rescuer, and they fall in love. Barf. No. Just no.

Please don't tell My Parents I'm a Super Villain! by Richard Roberts

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not much for series, but once in a while one comes along that makes me want to follow it, and if this series (this is book one of three as of this writing) is as good as its opener, then it will definitely be one I follow. Note that this novel is in no way representative of the real world and to judge it by real world standards is wrong. It's an off-kilter fantasy world, and it's in that context that I review it here since it's neither wilder nor more sensible than your average super hero graphic novel!

In the version of LA where she lives, Penelope Akk lives in a superhero world and has superhero parents. Mom was once a super villain, and dad is a tech genius, so it's hardly surprising their daughter turns out to be a mad scientist. Penny's skills start coming in far more aggressively than most do, but they also come spasmodically. That's nothing unusual, but the nature of Penny's skills deceive her parents, who pay her nowhere near the attention she deserves because they're supers themselves and always too busy. They may regret that.

Penny's real problem though, is that she creates things that typically work weirdly, and she has no idea how they work, and often no memory of the actual creative process at all. In the back of her mind they make sense, but she's never able to grasp that and pull it up front into the light. She invents some cool gadgets though, and what better way to test them out than with some good, old-fashioned villainy? I really liked Penny because she's a smart, strong young woman who never gives up and is always learning.

Teaming up with her friend Claire, and her other friend Ray, the trio becomes "The Inscrutable Machine" - talented and super-coordinated villains, whose success goes way beyond what their age would suggest they were capable of, and once Penny - now known as Bad Penny - has invented a few cool gadgets for her friends as well as a serum that brings on their powers too, they really take off. Claire becomes the extra-charming 'e-Claire' and Ray becomes the super-strong, super-fast 'Reviled'.

Their capers, beginning quite accidentally, become almost legendary, and bring them to the attention of Spider, the biggest villain of all, who is apparently an actual spider (although I had my doubts). It becomes ever more difficult for them to withdraw from their super villain life (it was so much fun!) and retreat to a life of super-heroing which is what Penny really wants. Or is it?

When Spider blackmails them into pulling a couple of jobs, Penny finds herself having to come down firmly on one side or the other. But how can she do that, save the city, beat Spider, and preserve her anonymity? Because the last thing she wants is for her parents to learn that she's a super villain! Yes, sometimes their thinking can be whack, and their motives a bit obscure, but they're so engaging that you can't stop wanting to know what scrape they'll get themselves into next - or how they'll get out of it. This is where Penny's unmatched, but totally not understood genius comes into play. Some of her inventions have a mind of their own - literally.

This book is one of the best I've ever read, despite it being aimed seemingly at a middle-grade audience. It's inventive and funny, and completely believable even as the fantastical world the author creates is outrageous - and beautifully put together with a cast of amazing and creative characters. There are some classic super heroes (my favorite is Marvelous) and super villains (my favorite is Lucy Farr). Note that these names are taken from an audiobook so the spellings may be off! I thought this was a fun world and a great book, and I commend it as a worthy read.

The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a quite long, and a heavily-referenced and indexed book about the intelligence of birds, how it works, how it evolved, what it's used for, how it expresses itself, and why some birds seem to have a lot more of it than others - and what this means going into an uncertain and climate-changing future. The book is full of stories and studies, as well as anecdotes, and is well-written and fully-engaging. It's packed with fascinating insights and fun facts, and covers a truly wide range of birds - and not just in North American but across the world. I found it enthralling and highly educational.

If I have a couple of complaints it would be that there were no pictures here. It's possible, of course to go look up online the birds that are mentioned, but it's a nuisance. It would have been nice had each bird discussed had a color picture to go with it. There are some line drawings, but these are used to separate the sections of the book, not to illustrate the text.

The only other complain is that while a lot of studies are discussed in the book, there is no information on what happened to the poor birds? Did the studies involve euthanizing them or where they merely captured, tested, and released? Some evidently were from what I gathered from the text, but in the case of others, their fate went unrevealed, and the studies didn't seem like they were non-invasive. It's all well and good to discuss the intelligence of birds, but if scientists are raping and pillaging nature to get this information on these birds which in some cases are threatened, then it seems to me I'd rather be ignorant about their intelligence than kill them off just to satisfy human curiosity! Maybe that's just me....

It wasn't the author who was doing this of course! She was merely reporting, but for a good reporter, especially one who seems to be so invested in her subject, you would think she'd have a care for the welfare of the subject. That aside, I did enjoy reading the book. It was well-written and it was a worthy read, so I commend it.

The Bees by DC Swain, Anna Bonita

Rating: WORTHY!

Written poetically by Swain and illustrated charmingly by Bonita, this is a somewhat fanciful and quite short story of a bee's day, from waking up to heading out to play and then getting down to work of gathering pollen, but first the hive must be defended from an overly inquisitive dog!

The story is playful and entertaining, and colorful. Before this, the author was batting a .66 with me, but he's now edged up to a .75, because I liked this book and commend it as a worthy read.

Witch Hunt by Shirley Damsgaard

Rating: WARTY!

This is a 300 page novel in first person voice which is typically too much for me. This is why I ditched all my unread print books a while back, that were in first person. I guess I missed this one so I decided to give it a go and it didn't surprise me when it didn't work. It's also part of a series which doesn't help. It's one of those series where the author tries to get the one word incorporate din every title in the series. Usually it's a dumb-ass main character name. in this one, it was the word 'witch'. I'm not a fan of that peccadillo.

The problem that killed this for me though wasn't so much the first person, although that's typically hard to take. It was the idea that there's unremitting and unpunished bullying going on in school. I know there's some, but when it's conducted by girls, it tends to be a lot more subtle and devastating than the uncontrolled (and ridiculous) classroom version depicted here. I don't know where this author got her ideas from - bad YA stories I guess, but that was the end of reading this for me. . On top of that, what's the point in making your detective a witch if she refuses to employ witchcraft to solve the crime? Admittedly your story would be short-lived if it were only a matter of casting a spell or two, to solve the crime every time, but an inventive writer would find ways around this.

It wasn't just that predictable crap, though. The story was all over the place, and it kept meandering off into uninteresting diversions. I know you have to let your character grow, but if the growth pains are that bad, I'd rather have an undeveloped character and a decent story than this. I grew bored and irritated, and that classroom bullying thing was just the last straw. The bottom line is that it was just bad and lazy writing, and I can't commend this based on the small portion I managed to get through

The Storybook of Legends by Shannon Hale

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
On one page I read, "She treaded water" - the past tense of 'to tread' is 'trod' (and also 'trodden'). It's not 'treaded' - not unless she put a tire tread on the water, which I guess is entirely possible if you can do magic....
Later I read, "But it's not like I can just look up in a phone book..." In context, this should have read, 'look her up in a phone book', or depending on what precisely the author meant, 'look in a phone book'. Either way something was wrong here!
Past tenses seemed to be a problem for Shannon Hale because later I also read, "Apple reached out and pet the dragon's tail...." This should have read 'petted'. While language is dynamic and changes over time, perhaps now faster than ever in history, some authors don't seem to get that there's actually a difference between reported speech and narration. Reported speech can be completely informal. Narration and description need to give at least a nod to grammar and correct tense!

Quite frankly, this book was an embarrassment to me and has been kept hidden away on my shelf like some sort of family black sheep. Finally I decided to take it out and read it and damn the torpedoes, and it has turned out to be highly entertaining, inventive, amusing, and fully-engaging. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Note that it's the Storybook of Legends, not leg ends, which would be quite effete....

I should not have been surprised, I guess, because I've had a positive history with its author Shannon Hale. This is, I think, the fourth or fifth thing of hers I've read and liked, but strictly speaking, it's not wholly original with her. The story has its roots in Mattel's monster dolls line. From that they created a fairy-tale doll line, and from that came a web series, a movie, and these books. Shannon Hale was, I guess, commissioned to write this one, and she did an amazing job with it. This was definitely my kind of novel even though it's not my kind of age range!

I can't promise to follow the whole series (I'm not a series sort of a guy), and especially since other volumes are written by other authors, but it was a highly enjoyable read, surprisingly. I came to admire the author both for her inventiveness and her winning sense of humor.

It's a sort of middle-grade fairy-tale fantasy in a series, no less! The series is called 'Ever After High', and it's about these children of famous fairy-tale characters returning to school after the holidays. Raven Queen is the daughter of the Evil Queen from "Snow White". Apple White is the daughter of Snow White. Cedar Wood is the daughter of Pinocchio, and Madeleine Hatter is the daughter of the Mad Hatter. Cerise Hood is the troubled daughter of red Riding Hood.

I think Maddie is my favorite character because she is so unapologetically nuts, and at several points actually has exchanges with the narrator of the novel, which I loved. Raven runs a close second as my favorite, and is an outstandingly intelligent and strong young woman. She's balking at being an evil queen like her mother was. She's supposed to feed the poisoned apple to Apple, but she doesn't want to be evil, and this makes people nervous because they think if she doesn't fulfill her role, then others' stories might fail and the whole of fairyland might collapse, so the plot is engaging, too.

The book ain't cheap! It was priced at fifteen dollars, but I recall picking it up at bargain discount at Costco several years ago. It intrigued me, but it seemed so juvenile that I hid it away until now. It's a hardcover which was printed in all these pastel shades, with the edges of the paper colored, and the pages having a colored border. After several years of looking at it and turning away, I decided to take the plunge and it proved so entertaining that I wished I had not let it sit for so long! It was a breath of fresh air and I enjoyed it for its irreverence and endless diversion - never boring, always...entrancing! I commend it fully.

Go On Girl by Hilary Grossman

Rating: WARTY!

I thought this might be interesting, but the main female character was so pathetic that I couldn't stand to read more than the first few chapters. It occurred to me that the title had a space too many, and should instead have been "Goon Girl"....

Sydney Clayton (and I can't for the life of me decide if that's supposed to hark back somehow to Sidney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities) is supposed to be a big and powerful executive in a corporation, but her character shows none of this, and she allows herself to be manipulated and used by the elitist women who live in the neighborhood as she tries to navigate her business life, her lackadaisical, cardboard-thin, and apparently useless husband, and her young child's schooling.

This book could have been a great story about how a caring and loving mother taught her daughter to be a strong and independent woman, but instead it takes the road most traveled and depicts her as allowing herself to be blackmailed into doing what these people want - otherwise her daughter will be punished with ostracism at school. Sydney was shamefully spineless, and completely betrayed her daughter. This was entirely out of character! How did a purportedly strong businesswoman get manipulated like this? It made no sense, was boring and poorly-written.

For example, I read at one point: "Last week, I was in the supermarket, and the woman in front of me at the deli counter had the same melody on her phone I used to." My first question immediately after reading that was "Used to...do what?" I had to read it twice more before it made sense and even than it was poorly written, and I'm not talking about ending a sentence with a preposition. I don't care about that. I'm talking about it being unclear and read one way it could be understood that this woman now owns the phone the speaker owned, or maybe should it have ended with 'too' instead of 'to'?! Oh no, I ended a sentence with 'to'! Seriously, it could have been written better and was emblematic of much of this book (at least the bit I read).

The clueless (as usual) blurb rambles, "As Sydney focuses on what is best for her daughter...." but she never does. How a female author can betray her gender like this, not only in how she depicts the mother, but in how she talks about the daughter (who really isn't allowed a voice), I can't understand. And the book assumes these children are mere robots, sent out into the world by their moms, and programmed to do whatever their moms want, like they have no independent thought or even minds at all. I can't commend this garbage.

Live to See Tomorrow by Iris Johansen

Rating: WARTY!

I was quickly done with this sad little thing. Iris Johansen was 76 when she wrote this in 2014 and I'm thinking she's either out of touch or perhaps becoming too long in the tooth to be writing stories of this nature. No one should write a story like this one. 2014 was three years before #MeToo became a viral movement, but she seems to have learned nothing from similar issues and movements, and consequently this book champions a codependent relationship in which no apparently means yes, in a minute.

The main character is abused from the outset when another controlling guy forces her out of her visit to her son in Hong Kong, and into an investigation of a dangerous killer because she happens to be in the right part of the world and there is a single policing agency anywhere near which can take care of it! Yeah! Right!

The writing is stilted and predictable and the story hopped around annoyingly without showing any interest in going anywhere interesting. I skimmed and skipped in the faint hope that it might improve, but it never did, which honestly didn't surprise me, and I dropped it. I can't commend it because of the appallingly poor writing to say nothing of the clueless relationships depicted here. I'm done with this author.

The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde

Rating: WORTHY!

This is perhaps my favorite play. The definitive movie version is that starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Frances O'Connor, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Anna Massey, and unfortunately, Reese Witherspoon, who I used to like until she played the "Do you know who I am?" card in 2013, when she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

This audiobook version is a fine work, and made me laugh out loud frequently. Unlike the movie, it's very true to the play, which is generally considered to be one of the best English comedies. Unfortunately the audiobook version I had did not list a single cast member so I can't list them here. I even went to the publisher's website (Highbridge Audio - this is part of the Highbridge Classics series) in search of a cast, and they offered nothing, which I feel was rather mean of them.

Wilde is unleashed full force through his various characters here, cutting a swathe through social convention and societal habit with great relish. Two friends, Jack and Algernon, have invented fictitious family or friends to give them each an excuse to get away from their regular life and duties, and escape into a fantasy world of complete irresponsibility. Jack's bother is called Earnest, and Earnest is actually jack, but in his Earnest guise, he pays no bills, misbehaves in general and has a great time. Algernon's invention is a sick friend named Bunbury, and Algernon often goes 'Bunburying' when he wants to get away, under the guise of visiting and taking care of his ailing friend.

Jack has an eighteen-year-old ward named Cecily Cardew, as well he should be having inherited her father's fortune. Jack is an adoptee with no family history, having been discovered by accident in a bag left at the baggage claim at Victoria Station in London. Jack is so in love with Algernon's cousin Gwendolen Fairfax that he actually proposes to her despite the disapproval of the formidable Lady Bracknell, who insists upon interviewing Jack regarding his suitability to press his suit. When Algernon learns of Jack's ward, he decides to press a suit of his own and goes down to Jack's country home, posing as Jack's fictional brother Earnest. The confusion and self-induced foot-shooting only increase from there.

The joy of this is listening to Wilde's take on life, and hearing it expressed as a holistic philosophy from these two reprobates. I highly commend this, or the movie, or going to see the play performed if you can, or simply reading the play for yourself. It's available free from Project Gutenberg in ebook form.

The Genesis Code by John Case aka Jim Hougan, Carolyn Hougan

Rating: WARTY!

I guess you can call this a case study given the author's name, and it ended up in the john. Of course the name on the book isn't the author's real name. Normally I detest authors who, for want of a more circumspect term, outright lie about their identity, but I can see why these authors did it, because certainly, they wouldn't want this one on their record of publishing non-fiction books. This is a case of a professional trying to write fiction, and somehow feeling he or she has to lecture we poor readers about their professional business. No thanks. They remind me of Clive Cussler, the late unlamented author who essentially put himself into his novels, not even thinly-disguised.

These appear to be using the same tactic and so it's both the first and last book of theirs that I'll ever tried to read. I wasn't impressed. The book was all over the place and I found myself starting to skim after only a few pages asking, fruitlessly as it happened - or more accurately failed to happen - is anything actually going to happen?

It's one of those books that jumps around like a nervous and finicky flea, never quite knowing where to take a stand and get down to it, so we're all over the place with different people doing different things. One assumes this will all come together in the end, but I do not like this style of writing and quickly tired of it.

The other big problem is that of the author making dramatic claims about world-shocking revelations, and then moving right on to the next unrelated chapter without offering a word as to what this revelation is, when it's patently obvious from the blurb what's going on. Why be so ridiculously coy? It's just annoying. In the real world - which be warned this novel is patently not set, no secret like this would ever escape the attention of the press. It would be all over the place. The novel is over two decades old, so social media was not then what it is now, but certainly it would have been in social media too, even back them, such as it was back then.

The author's stand-in is named 'Joe Lassiter' in this novel. I can only assume that Joe is the middle name and the unmentioned first name is "Average." We learn that his sister and her son were killed and their home set on fire and when he learns of another such murder, he goes on to uncover a "truth that will shock him - and the world - to the very bone." Yeah, someone is trying to clone Jesus. What a bunch of horseshit!

For that to happen, there would have actually have to have been a Jesus to clone. There wasn't - not a son of god Jesus, anyway. Jesus was such a common name back then how would they even be sure they had the right one?! And what the hell difference would it have made? Is the author saying that this purported divine being can be recreated by cloning his physical body which was nothing more than the union of genetic material from his ordinary human parents? The whole idea is patently ridiculous from the outset.

The dramatic claims about this book, contained in the blurb are grotesquely overdone. This sort of a book always claims that the story is so shocking it won't be believed - well, that one I buy, because I don't believe the claim! The thing is that we've had these "shocking" claims out in public for years - for example, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, in Dan Brown's rip-off of Michael Meehan's, Richard Leigh's, and Henry Lincoln's 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail and none of that has made even the minutest impression on the church.

Why would it? Believers are those who believe not in the face of lacking evidence, but in spite of the overwhelmingly negative evidence, so nothing is going to shock them or change their mind; that's a given. Be wary of any book that makes any such claim. There's nothing new under the sun.

Also be wary of eye-disturbing book covers! Fortunately for authors, the last thing I judge a book by is the cover, because if I did, this particular one - with the glaring red background and baby-shit brown punched tape over it making the title and author's fake name almost impossible to read - would have failed while it still sat on the bookstore shelf. I can't imagine why any publisher would let a book out of its doors with a cover like this one. I guess the take home lesson here is that you should never have your book cover designed by Red Ruth Ross.

So no, this book was badly-written, and I never actually got into it far enough to see if the plot was even remotely reasonable which was why I'd decided to try reading it in the first place. So: fail! Can't commend.

Waking Up in Eden by Lucinda Fleeson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a biographical print book that I picked up because it sounded interesting and in the end, by and large, it really was quite engaging. In that respect it did go downhill a little toward the end, but in Hawaii, it's all downhill right? I mean they are volcanic islands after all! There was a bit more personal stuff in here than I cared for, and I certainly didn't need to know about the author's fling with a surfer dude, but aside from that thankfully very brief inter-lewd, the monologue about Hawaii, its history, traditions, exploration, and its flora and fauna were really quiet charming and well-written.

The author was a journalist, but decided to give up that life and move to Hawaii to take on the job of a fund-raiser for a botanical garden which aimed to preserve something of old Hawaii, and to exhibit it for the public. She spent many years there becoming pleasantly habituated to the life (after some initial hiccups), and stayed in the job until her immediate boss died from a heart-attack and her new boss seemed, she writes, more intent upon slashing budgets than pursuing his predecessor's goals.

Frankly I felt the author could have done more in terms of detailing Hawaii's wildlife, plants and animals and how they interlock. She does go into some detail about how tragical has been the human occupation of the islands, and how it has resulted in a massive extinction because of human predation and human-introduced invasive species, such as rats for example, along with feral cows, mongooses (yes, you heard that right), pigs and feral cats and dogs. Hawaii is the shameful world-leader in modern extinctions of plant species for example, where an estimated two plant species go extinct every year which is five hundred times faster than any purely natural rate. This is why some conservationists call Hawaii 'the extinction capital of the world'.

The mongoose was a seriously misguided error. It was introduced because the capitalistic sugar cane producers wanted the rats controlled, but the damage mongooses have done has more than outweighed the few rats they ate, since they prey on whatever takes their fancy and this includes Hawaiian species that have suffered far more greatly than rats ever will. This is what happens when people who are clueless about science are put in charge. Of pretty much anything.

It would have been nice to have more of that kind of overview in place of the unprotected sex on a first date chapter that we got, but that opportunity has gone now. That said though, I did enjoy this book for the most part and consider it a worthy read.

Dalya and the Magic Ink Bottle by JM Evenson

Rating: WARTY!

This is aimed at middle-grade readers and so is not for me. Despite not warming to it myself, I tried to see how it might appeal to a younger reader, but even then it felt like it wasn't up to snuff.

For me it felt confused and cluttered, and the main character went from being put in peril here, to being put in a different peril there, and then yet another one everywhere. It felt like it was far too much, with barely time to take a breather. I know that when you want to entertain young children, there has to be danger, but this felt like it was all danger all the time with no respite, no downtime, and little humor to buoy-up the main participants.

Dalya is of Turkish ancestry and when she gets a chance to travel there with her father (mom is predictably out of the picture), she jumps at the chance to 'reconnect' with him, but he proves just as unreachable there as he is at home. They stay at a largely derelict and old family mansion in Istanbul, which is badly-neglected and unsafe in many regards. Naturally, Dalya disobeys her father's strict instructions to remain on the first floor of the house because upstairs is unsafe, and in chasing a cat she espies, she discovers a bottle of magic ink hidden under a floorboard.

The ink is supplied by a djin, and grants only one wish to each user. Dalya wishes to go home, but instead ends up being sent back in time and turned into a cat - the very cat she was chasing upstairs in the first place. How this happened was never explained, given that her explicitly stated wish was to return home. The cat she becomes is apparently a magical cat, although throughout the story the cat never actually does any magic, which struck me as very curious, and a waste of a good cat to boot. Why give it all the appearance of being magical if it serves no purpose?

In order to return to her human self, and to return to her own time, Dalya must embark upon an adventure through the mythology of Istanbul in quest of the djin who owns the bottle, in order to have her wish revoked. This is all well and good, but these folk tales and animal stories don't resonate well with people who have never heard them before, and it felt like the author was trying to toss in everything but the kitchen sink (although that also appeared in the story, I believe).

I can understand that these things might well appeal to the author and be very meaningful to her, but to me they really felt like a jumble of unrelated ideas that didn't really gel together, and which left me unsatisfied and a bit lost at times, too. I felt it could have been done better. The ending was too predictable. For the intended audience, maybe that's not such a bad thing; indeed, they may well get much more out of this that I did, but I've read many middle-grade stories and really enjoyed a lot of them. This one didn't get there for me and I can't commend it as a worthy read.

Bellamy and the Brute by Alicia Michaels

Rating: WARTY!

This is - quite obviously from the title, a take on the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, and it's not my usual fare, but since I'm working - on and off, and nroe off than on lately! - on my own redux of a fairytale, sometimes I take stock of what other authors are doing. I don't consider them my competition because I don't write quite like other authors, but it never hurts to look up from that keyboard once in a while and see what's going on around you. This to explain why I embarked on this, a first person voice YA novel which I normally flee from. While it wasn't completely awful, it had multiple, predictable issues, and I certainly wasn't much impressed considering this was supposed to be professionally published.

The novel is larded with YA trope and additionally, there are some curious writing peccadillos in it. Aside from the ritualistic first person PoV which I typically detest because it's tired, annoying, and derivative, but which fortunately wasn't overly nauseating in this particular story, there's the trope of the jerk of a school jock who's after this girl Bellamy. She of course has no interest in this brute because she's saving herself for a different brute!

Also, there's the predictable alienation and school bullying which is the hallmark of ninety percent of YA high-school stories. People make fun of this girl because her dad thinks he can see ghosts. How everyone else knows about this was not explained at least up to the point where I quit reading which was a little under halfway through. I'd thought about quitting before then, more than once, but I kept on going. Foolishly, it's now clear.

There is of course the single-parent family trope, but I can't really call it on that because that's part of the original story. One thing I didn't get was the choice of the name Bellamy for the main character. It know a lot of parents think it's cool to use some family's last name as their daughter's first name (Mackenzie, Madison, Reilly, etc), but while Bellamy (bel ami) is of French origin (it means good friend or nice friend), it has no direct correlation to the name Beauty; however, I was willing to let that go.

Another strange occurrence was when Bellamy visited her mother's grave late at night for no apparent reason (except of course for her to encounter a shadowy hooded figure this one night - and we all know who that is - Tate the stalker!). But in the real world, why not stop by the cemetery right after school? There's no reason to go late at night. The thing is though that the text said "I located her headstone with very little effort," and I had to wonder why was it any effort at all to find her mother's headstone if she'd been in the habit of doing this for two years? It made no sense.

Sometimes, the text itself would make no sense, as when I read, "I had my dad, which was more than most people could claim to have." What the hell does that mean? That most people have no father? Their father is dead or a deadbeat dad? That they can't connect with their father? This is patent nonsense! I have no idea what she meant by that, but clearly, whatever it was she was trying to say, it's ridiculous.

There was another part which was equally meaningless. I read the following:

"I never see her," he murmured just before I could leave.
I paused, my hand on the doorknob. "Never see who?"

This would have been perfectly fine except that it appeared very shortly after several maudlin paragraphs about it being 2 years to the day since her mom's death, so how could she not get what her father was referring to? This kind of writing makes your main character look stupid. As if that wasn't odd enough, her dad's habit of continuing to call his 17-year-old daughter 'munchkin' was truly an irritation.

It wasn't as much an irritation though as the author's fetish with starting every other sentence with a present participle, making her sound like a tiresomely passive person. Okay, so it wasn't literally every other paragraph, but even I was surprised by how common it was when it reached a point where it had become not just noticeable, but actually irritating, and I went back and checked to see if it was occurring as often as it felt like it was. I found in the first few screens the following:

• "Making my way to the front room, I..."
• "Noticing a stack of boxes near the door, I..."
• "Pointing to the paper laid on the counter, he..."
• "Standing on tiptoe, I..."
• "Pushing those depressing thoughts aside, I..."
  "Flipping it to the employment section, I..."
  "Spotting an ad requesting a summertime babysitter for two young kids, I..."
  (these were all on the same screen in three successive paragraphs)
• "Hanging up the phone, I..."
• "Edging slowly down the hall, I..."
• "Retreating to the kitchen, I.."
• "Pausing with the fork halfway to his mouth, he..."
• "Frowning, I..."
• "Hesitating for a moment, I..."
• "Raising his eyebrows, he..."

Seriously? This screams lazy author and even worse, bad editor.

I pressed on and followed the story to the point where Bellamy and Tate (the 'brute' of the title) were about to start on investigating why two ghosts haunted the Baldwin mansion where Tate lived and Bellamy was babysitting his two younger siblings for the summer. Why Tate himself, who is permanently housebound (living in the Tate Gallery! LOL!), cannot do this is left unexplained.

These ghosts were terrifying, and Bellamy first encountered Tate fleeing from them after she'd predictably gone to the forbidden third floor. I guess it's supposed to be obvious that the brutishness of Tate is a curse for the evil his family has perpetrated (and some that he himself did), but the novel makes the serious mistake of letting slide Tate's real brutishness, Tate which is that he is a manic and cruel.

He mistreats Bellamy repeatedly and she always finds an excuse for his unacceptable behavior. Just when it seems like he might be about to reform, he gets into an unnecessary fight with this tediously trope school bully who's been trying to get into Bellamy's pants for a while. She's had no problem fending him off, but Tate treats Bellamy like she's a helpless a child who can't protect herself and needs managing! He takes over control of her life at that point by going after this bully. He gets into a physical fight with him and beats him savagely, and Bellamy sees no problem with his behavior. The beaten bully leaves with the clichéd threat, "This isn't over!"

It was for me. I could not stand to read any more about this from that point and had lost all interest in learning what the deal was with these two ghosts. The ridiculous thing about that was that right when Bellamy and Tate finally decide to confront the ghosts and discover what it is that causing them to haunt the Baldwin mansion, neither Tate or Bellamy ever thinks to ask who the ghosts are or what happened to them. This proves both of these guys are morons.

This trope of the ghosts showing up and only bit by bit revealing their story is so tired, and so clichéd. The ghosts appear unable to speak, but they can write. They evidently cannot manipulate air to voice words, but they can manipulate physical objects and wreck Tate's room one evening like a pair of deranged poltergeists. It was pathetic and illogical.

So I'm done with this story and with this author. I can't commend it. It was indeed brutish and awful in the end and kept getting worse the more I read of it.

Skinwalker by Faith Hunter

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb for one of the books in this series caught my attention, and even though I'm series-averse and will never write one myself, I was curious about this one, so I got the one I was interested in, plus an earlier one in the series to read as an intro. Please be informed that my curiosity didn't long survive my beginning reading of this trope-filled novel.

Jane Yellowrock looks like she's Asian on the cover, especially with that stereotype of a cue, but she's apparently American Indian. I just got through a short and sassy discussion of book covers with a long time email friend and it was her opinion that covers are all important. It's my opinion that they're shallow and misleading depictions of the content of the book created all-too-often by someone who appears to have no clue what the book is about, let alone actually read it themselves.

These covers are a case in point. I know that IRL, people do go by book covers, but I think it's stupid and shallow for anyone to judge a book by its cover. Quite obviously, it's the content that matters. I'd far rather read a good book with a shitty cover than a lousy one with an artwork for a cover (although I might buy a used copy of the artwork one for display if not to read!)

A major character in a novel I'm working on as I write this review is an American Indian, so I sure have no problem with reading about one, but to lead a reader to believe it's about an Asian main character from the cover illustration, and then have someone of different ethnicity actually be in the novel is a piss-off at best. This is my beef about misleading book covers in a nutshell.

Add to that a bunch of info-dumping in the book, some of which seems to me to stereotype the main character, and I'm going to lose interest pretty fast, I promise you. This is the same kind of problem American Dirt has from what I've read about it. Blurbs can be misleading too, but I don't think they're quite as misleading as the wrong cover no matter how many squees that cover gets at the 'unveiling' party! Seriously? I mean how freaking shallow and pompous can we get?

The next problem was the first person voice, which is unrealistic at best, and which I detest unless it's really done well. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it isn't. This book features Jane traveling to New Orleans. She's recovered from a devastating fight with vampires (so we're told) and is looking to get back into her business of bringing down the rogues, in this Trublood rip-off of a fantasy world where vampires and other paranormals are out and accepted at least in principle.

So this story's been done (to death) before, but I thought this author might bring something new based on the book blurbs. Unfortunately, those can be as misleading (or as dishonest, however you view it) as the cover can, and I felt misled by this one. I know the author typically doesn't write the blurb or illustrate the cover unless they self-publish - and perhaps not even then - but you'd think someone who's running a purportedly successful series would be able to police the appearance of her books a bit better. On the other hand, why offer discounted books if you're selling them handsomely already? Maybe the series is in trouble. I dunno.

Anyway, Yellowrock arrives in town and meets with the trope vampire monarch - in this case a queen. Before she even gets there some sleazy stalker jerk on a motorbike is already slavering and panting after Yellowrock like a dog in heat. While bugs (the spying kind, not the insect kind) on the premises of the house she's going to be staying in piss-off Yellowrock, this dick of a guy stalking her didn't bother her at all! This turned me off the whole book, so I ditched it about thirty pages in. It was too sickening to read.

I refuse to commend a book like this and I'm done with this author.

The Tethering by Megan O'Russell

Rating: WARTY!

This novel aimed at middle-graders, read like a direct and unimaginative rip-off of Harry Potter. If that's what you want, then this is for you, but be warned that there's literally nothing new here.

There's the almost statutory impoverished orphan boy who has no idea he's a magician, and who accidentally exhibits magical powers. Here he's named Jacob, not Harry, and he learns that he's a wizard, so of course, he's spirited away to a special academy for witches and wizards, where there's a supercilious bully by the name of Malfoy - no, wait, in this version, it's Dexter. He's probably secretly a serial-killer-killer who darkly dreams.

There's the trope magic wand, except here it's called a talisman, and it doesn't have to be a wand. That's about the only real difference I noticed. Jacob has a special relationship with a tree(!) - in this case not a Whomping Willow, but a tree he heals and which then dispenses a twig to him that he uses as a wand. There's a group called the Magi (read Ministry of Magic), and there's a group called the Dragons (read: Death Eaters). Actually I got the impression that Jacob would probably end up joining them - either that or Hermione would - sorry, not Hermione! Here she's named Emilia and she is no doubt the finest witch of her age.

The novel is pretty sad: uninventive, unimaginative, offering nothing new. In it, magic affects electronic devices badly, just like in Harry Potter, but unlike in the Harry Potter stories, nobody seems intent on actually teaching Jacob to do magic. He's pretty much left to self-study, which seems to me to completely undermine the idea of an academy.

Maybe Potter-by-rote was the author's intention, but reading poor clones of existing books does nothing for me. especially since after two days at the academy no one has taught him a damned thing about how to do any magic. Despite this faux air of desperation that's created (that he must learn!), no-one seems interested in actually teaching him. He's sent off by himself to study a book containing magic spells, which are of course actuated by saying words in Latin. Seriously?

I never liked this garbage in the Potter novels. A lot of Rowling's writing made little sense if you began to analyze it, but at least she held it together and told a decently engaging story. This thing with the Latin though, was nonsensical throughout because it essentially said that there could have been no witches or wizards before Latin was invented as a language, even as we're supposed to believe that magic was ancient. Latin is certainly not world's earliest language, so how did witches and wizards (yes, this book insists on the same gender discrimination that Rowling did - but then Rowling thinks there are only two genders). Before Latin there was Etruscan and Greek. Before that was Phoenician. Before that was Egyptian, and before that Sumerian.

Although the terms 'witch', 'wizard' (both of which may derive from the same root) and 'sorcerer' are relatively new, dating back perhaps to the middle ages, the idea of wizardry dates back millennia - to ancient Egypt and beyond. The thing is: how did they ever cast their spells back then without access to the magic of speaking Latin? LOL! And if ordinary Latin words could cast spells even without a wand, how come the ancient Romans weren't known for their magical prowess? None of that makes any freaking sense.

This is why I can't commend this book as a worthy read. Middle-graders deserve better.

Sophie Washington the Snitch by Tonya Duncan Ellis

Rating: WARTY!

This is a really short book (seventy screens on my phone) and even then I could not finish it. I read only the first chapter. It was in first person which I can't usually stand, and worse than that, it was about bullying and the lack of a response to it. That's where the snitch comes in - apparently no one wants to be tarred by that brush, so when the school bully, a girl named Lanie, robs school-friends Sophie and Chloe of their money right after they arrive at school, nothing gets done.

Now you can argue "well isn't that the point of the story?" - revealing how something will change and something will get done? But I don't buy that, because this story has been done so many times before and this one offers nothing new, nothing different. A better story would have been to have a school where snitching isn't a crime - because it should not be. You report crimes. You report bullying. You report robbery. It's bad to have children feel they should not, and it doesn't matter if the story eventually gets there. The problem is that it's not there to begin with. A better story-teller would have started from that point and found some other issue to address, or some other way to tell her story instead of stamping a 'wrong' firmly onto the brains of juvenile and impressionable readers right from the off.

Because this story was going nowhere new and started from very tired trope, I can't commend it as a worthy read. I couldn't stand to read it. Maybe the readers it's aimed at might find it more readable, but that still wouldn't make it right.